Note: I originally guest-posted this on the wonderful blog thebooksnugglers.com. Read the original post here.

I’m never able to read as much as I want to read. That’s my lament, year after year. Still, even as my “to read” pile gets higher and higher, I somehow manage to read about forty to fifty books each year. And, among those books, there are always a select few that stand out. The following books are a few of my favorites of the year. If you read them, I hope you love them as much as I did.

Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O’Grady

First published in 1963 for young children (in the days before there was even a category called “young adult”), this macabre little masterpiece was happily reissued in the spring by Bloomsbury. Let’s Kill Uncle tells the story of two children who meet one summer on a remote Canadian island. Barnaby, the orphan, is there to spend time with his uncle/guardian, and Christie was sent away by her mother for the summer, presumably so she could get the child out of her hair for a few months. Barnaby and Christie are delightfully ill-behaved, always stumbling into mischief of some sort, but it’s impossible not to love them. But why won’t anyone on the island believe them when they realize that Barnaby’s creepy and wicked uncle is trying to kill him? That’s when the two children realize that they’ll just have to kill him first. Funny, dark, touching, full of local color and a vibrant cast of eccentric characters (including an escaped, aged cougar), Let’s Kill Uncle is a classic worth rediscovering.

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard

Beard’s debut novel is hilarious but also serious, and is brilliantly told from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in Ohio in the 1970s. Not much happens here plot-wise—in many ways it’s the standard coming-of-age story, where an awkward girl suddenly discovers boys and deals with the indignities of daily life as a teenager. But Beard’s writing is so sharp, so exquisitely detailed, so witty, and so emotionally honest, that the story feels revelatory. I haven’t read many books that have taken me so deeply and convincingly inside the head of a female adolescent. Here’s just one of the narrator’s wonderfully wry observations: “I hate the phrase late bloomers. It sounds old fashioned and vaguely rank, like something a prairie women would wear under her sweaty calico dress.” Read this book and savor every sentence.

If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter

Ryan Van Mater’s collection of personal essays traces his life from boyhood to adolescence to adulthood—a life that is filtered through the lens of growing up gay. Van Meter has the special ability that all great writers have—he makes the personal feel universal. When I read these pieces—about trying on women’s clothes, about first love, about hating the outdoors—I nodded my head in recognition so many times that I almost got whiplash. The entire collection is a beauty. But it’s worth buying for the first essay alone, a gem entitled “First.” It will leave your heart aching, but in a good way.

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt

Already a finalist for the National Book Award this fall, don’t be surprised if Gary D. Schmidt’s novel wins the Newberry in a few weeks. It’s been almost universally acclaimed, and after reading it, I agreed with all the laudatory praise. It brims with life, and is about family, friendship, growing up, and the power of art to transform a life. If that makes it sound boring, well, trust me, it’s not. It’s actually a rip-roaring page-turner with a heart of gold.

A few recent articles have been weighing in about YA lit. Most recently, the Boston Globe published an article called “Young Adult Novels Heating Up the Charts.” Really, this is news? I guess it’s not news to me, since I work in the publishing industry and because I’m a YA writer. But is that really news to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock? It seems like every week or so we have an article about how popular YA is becoming, how adults are now reading more and more YA, how “mature” YA lit is becoming, how these books really are quite good and even—shock of shocks—actually well written. Yada yada yada. Every article dutifully ticks off the books that paved the way—Harry Potter, then the Twilight novels—and then circles around to the newest sensation, The Hunger Games trilogy. I suppose these stories have their place, and anything that highlights the YA world is fine with me, but it also just seems like the same article gets dusted off every few months, presented as something new.

A few of these recent pieces even had near-identical titles: The Atlantic’s “How Young Adult Fiction Came of Age” and Publishers Weekly’s “YA Comes of Age.” Once again, I came away from these stories feeling like I had not read anything new. The PW article—which opens with “The young adult market these days is a bit like a nephew you haven’t seen in years: transformed from a little darling into a hulking almost-grownup who is maybe even a little scary”—largely discussed trends in YA, touching on the Harry/Twilight/Hunger trifecta, naturally. Interestingly, the article, quoting agents and editors, seemed to predict that the paranormal genre is losing steam. But who knows? Kids still seem to eat these up. I keep waiting for dystopia books to lose steam, and yet more and more keep coming out, and they all seem to be pretty successful. The Atlantic article at least concluded with a great take-away quote from Erin Kelly, a novelist and short story writer, discussing the challenges of writing YA, in case anyone out there thought it was not only easier to read such books, but also easier to them:

You have to remember a time from your past–the sound of sneakers on the gym floor, the smell of lockers and middle school hallways and, most importantly, the way it felt to be an adolescent. You have to remember the struggle of wanting to be an individual, but needing to fit in, of loving and hating your parents at the same time, of trying to maneuver through the social strata. And you not only have to remember what adolescence feels and looks like, you have to be able to convey it with a believable tone and voice that relates to readers. I’m not sure anyone could call that easy. That there is nothing easy about writing a good book, whether it’s a picture book with 50 words or a novel with 50,000.”

If you want to read some fresher, more interesting articles, try some of these I’ve recently come across:

• Tracy Clark-Flory made the “case for raunchy teen lit” in Salon. I can get behind that.
• Again in Salon, Brian McGreevy argued “Why teens should read adult fiction.” Maybe a no-brainer, but still a good piece. Of course, YA lit—as we all know!—is go great now, so mature, that there’s no reason kids shouldn’t read both adult books and all the great YA books on the market.
• On the Today Show web site, of all places, Jennifer Worick featured the “10 Books You Really Should Have Read in High School.” Check out the list and see how deficient (or sufficient) your high school was. I think the only two books on this list that I read in high school were To Kill a Mockingbird and The Scarlet Letter. Sadly, I read most of the others (like The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye) on my own—and some I still haven’t read (a big “no thanks” on the Hesse).
• The National Book Awards for Young Adult Literature were overshadowed by the who Lauren Myracle mess. I won’t go into that again. Instead, let’s focus on the positive. The winner was Thanhha Lai for her novel-in-verse, Inside Out & Back Again. Lai immigrated from Vietnam to Alabama in the 1970s, so I’m extra curious about this one. Here’s an interview with Lai from Publishers Weekly. Meanwhile, all of the finalists were written up in a nice piece in the Washington Post. I can vouch for Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now. It’s wonderful.

I finally got around to watching the series finale of Friday Night Lights, and now I feel like a good friend has moved away. I’ve written about my love—maybe the better word is “obsession”—for the show in the past. But now that series has ended its run, it is time for a brief reflection.

So, yeah, I’m depressed that it’s all over. I know I can always go back and watch all of the seasons on DVD. Plus, I’ve never actually read the book that it’s based on, written by Buzz Bissinger—so I have that to look forward to. Still, I’m a little bummed that we’ve said farewell to Eric and Tami Taylor and all of the other memorable denizens of Dillon, TX. It was a rare, graceful show—sentimental but tough, romantic but realistic, spare but expansive. I feel in love with the characters and worried about their fates as if they were actual friends. And I don’t think any show has made my cry as much on a consistent basis.

The final season was, no surprise, excellent. Even if the replacement teenagers (Luke, Vince, Becky, etc.) never held a candle to the original young stars of the first few seasons, I still grew to love and care about all of them, and about their stories, their lives, their futures. This is a testament to the show’s writers, but also to the young actors themselves. Hell, everyone involved—directors, casting directors, those who chose the music—were clearly top notch.

Since everyone deservedly focuses on the brilliance of Kyle Chandler’s Eric Taylor and Connie Britton’s Tami Taylor (who BETTER win Emmys this year), I’d like to single out one actor who stood out for me this season, and who encapsulates what makes Friday Night Lights so special: Stacey Oristano’s performance as Mindy Collette Riggins. Prior to this season, Mindy was known mainly as Tyra’s somewhat trampy pole-dancing older sister, and then as Billy Riggins’ girlfriend and eventual wife. But this season, Mindy emerged into a full-blooded, wonderful character, caring for her new baby, dealing with her guilt-addled and still-immature husband, and also taking young Becky under her wing, reluctantly and then full-heartedly becoming her de-facto mother/big sister. Mindy was a perfect example of how, on this show, even the minor characters can be deep, fleshed-out people, full of their own hurts and small triumphs. Somehow, this shallow-seeming stripper turned into a compelling young woman, revealing both her vulnerabilities and strong maternal instincts. Watching Oristano as Mindy was one of the chief pleasures of this wonderful, pleasure-filled final season.

And what a finale. (Spoiler alert!) The final minutes, especially, were brilliant. The camera cuts away from the climactic last play of the state championship game—as the ball careens through the air toward the end zone, as the seconds tick down on the game clock—to reveal where the characters lives have gone eight months later. It felt, at first, like we were being denied some big dramatic moment. Did they win the game or not? If so, why can’t we see the explosive celebration? But in the end, it was the perfect way to end the series. Because although football was a huge part of the show, it was never just about football, it was about the characters. And the final minutes left us with indelible images of these characters and the lives they continue to live, both on and off the football field.

Anyway, I could go on and on. But before I shut up about Friday Night Lights, I wanted to share some wonderful links, articles, and other tidbits I’ve come across the past few weeks.

• First up are two awesome video compilations. This one is a montage of all the times Tami Taylor has said “y’all.” Maybe it’s not even exhaustive, but it is pretty awesome. I mean, how can you not love this woman? And here’s a great compilation of Coach Eric Taylor’s moving and oft-tear-jerking speeches on the show, including the famous motto, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
• If you’re a newbie to the show, or a long-time fan, you’ll love this (mostly) complete cast roster from all five seasons, covering everyone from tragic-to-triumphant Jason Street to Devin and Coach Stan Traub, two of the only gay characters ever to make an appearance on the show.
• Perhaps the most amazing read of all is this oral history of the TV series, which appeared on the new sports blog Grantland. True fans of the show will eat this up. I only wish it had been about a hundred pages longer.
• I think I already referenced this article, which compared Friday Night Lights with Glee, and lamented how the latter show grabbed all of the ratings glory. It’s a great read. I love, particularly, what the writer, Heather Havrilesky, writes near the end: “’Friday Night Lights’ embraces the rough edges, the fumbling, the understated beauty and uncertainty of the everyday. It’s rare for a TV show to acknowledge that happiness is a fragile, transient thing.”
• And, finally, it turns out that one of my favorite fiction writers, Lorrie Moore, is also a huge fan of the show. This week, she pens a juicy essay and appreciation for The New York Review of Books.

Now that we’re well into July, when the dog days of summer are settling in, why not pick up a page-turning novel about being trapped in a brutal winter snowstorm? That’s what you get in Michael Northrop’s TRAPPED. Recently on NPR.com, a reviewer wrote, “Michael Northrop’s tension in Trapped builds the way the snow does, accumulating in drifts, blocking windows, casting the story into darkness. The novel buries you.” Michael writes so well about the cold, about the snow, that you’ll soon forget that, outside, it’s blisteringly hot and humid. You might even reach for a heavy blanket to warm your chilled bones.

Michael is a pal, and he’s also in my YA Book Club, so he kindly agreed to answer some questions. Enjoy, and then go pick up his novel!

The details of the snow and the bitter cold described in TRAPPED are so visceral and realistic. Can I assume you grew up in a wintry environment?

I did! I grew up in a snowy, little no-stoplight-having town in New England. When I was a kid, we got around four feet of snow in one storm, and I wasn’t much more than four feet tall at the time. There is a scene in TRAPPED where a character has to walk through chest-deep snow, and I’ve definitely done that.

Have you ever experienced a blizzard like the one described in TRAPPED?

No, no, nothing up to the second floor, but I have spent hours staring out the window and wondering if the snow will ever stop. One of my favorite poems is Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—the original 13 Reasons Why!—the part that goes:

It was evening all afternoon./It was snowing/And it was going to snow.

I know that feeling!

Did you need to do any research while writing the novel?

I did some research on big winter storms. I used to edit the meteorology section of The World Almanac (among many other sections), and I’m a huge Discovery Channel nerd, so I already knew a lot of that. I didn’t want to get too bogged down in details, though. The characters really don’t understand their environment all that well and encounter it by observation. They don’t know exactly why the heat shuts off, for example, but they can feel it slowly bleeding from the building.

Exploring this question further, did you have to do any kind of “field research”? For instance, did you create your own snowshoes (as Scotty does)? Have you ever tried to build a go-kart? I imagine fact-checking a lot of this stuff was a challenge! But everything rings completely true.

I basically stayed close to home on that stuff. I was a small-town kid. I’ve used snowshoes, taken shop class, gazed in ineffable, openmouthed envy at another kid’s go-kart. It’s stuff that most kids don’t do anymore, and maybe never did, so it seems sort of exotic or nostalgic or something, but it was comfortable terrain for me.

Early in the novel, the narrator, Scotty, foreshadows that things aren’t going to end well for all of the students. This, of course, creates an almost unbearable tension throughout the novel. Did you know from the outset the fates of each of the characters, or did this shift as you went along?

No, I didn’t know at all! It was actually kind of eerie, because I wrote that line in the opening section (about not everyone surviving) in my typical writing trance. I basically caffeinate, crack my knuckles, look down, and start typing. On a good day, which that was, when I look up again I’ve got a thousand words done and a sore back. I remember thinking: Well, that’s that. I’ve got to kill at least one of them now… Such a morbid thought!

The school building almost becomes a menacing character in the novel. Kind of like the claustrophobic spaceship in Alien, or perhaps a haunted house from a ghost story. Was this intentional?

Yeah, absolutely. I think almost every student feels trapped in school at some point anyway. It’s not like they have a choice about being there. So the most basic thing I was trying to do was just to literalize that: Yes, last period can feel like it’s dragging on for days. The way we encounter our environment is extremely subjective, even under normal conditions. But what if it really did drag on for days? And your life was in real danger? It’s the same basic idea. The spaceship in Alien didn’t seem especially claustrophobic until something started hunting them on it.

In writing TRAPPED, were you influenced at all by horror novels or movies? Are you a fan of horror novels and movies?

I am a fan, and I’m sure I was influenced, but it’s hard to say how or to what extent. I have been consuming that content almost my entire life, from those first ghost stories when I was a kid right up to this morning, when I saved Insidious to my Netflix queue. It is so deeply ingrained in me—in most of us, I’d imagine. I did read Poe in high school and college, though, and I’m sure some of that probably seeped in there. You know, a drop of “The Cask of Amontillado” here, a swipe of “The Pit and the Pendulum” there . . .

What character did you relate to most in the novel? Least?

I related to Scotty the most. Like him, I was a serious athlete in high school but not necessarily a total jock. He’s also the main character, so I probably gave him more little bits and pieces of myself than the others. I’m not sure about the least, though. I probably have a second-, third-, and fourth-place, and then everyone else is tied. They all had something important about them that I felt I understood, at least by the end.

If you were trapped in a snowstorm for a week, what book would you want to have with you?

Reading is hard work for me (I am dyslexic), so rereading has always seemed like a huge, vaguely unfair chore. I’d definitely want some big, immersive book that I’d never read before but would end up loving. Something like The Secret History or Moby-Dick.

Speaking of books, have you read any books recently that knocked your socks off?

Are you fishing for me to say Matterhorn here? Because that was last year, Martin. All right? Would you please give it a rest? (Haha!) Matterhorn—a big, enthralling, devastating novel about the Vietnam War for those who don’t work at the publisher—was definitely the best book I read in 2010. I haven’t quite found a match for it so far this year, either, but I have high hopes for a few recent acquisitions. I’ll let you know!

There have been so many great responses and follow-ups to the Wall Street Journal article on “dark” and “lurid” YA novels, and below are some that I think are worth sharing–that is, if you’re not sick of this story already!

Josie Leavitt gives a bookseller’s perspective in Publishers Weekly. “There is balance to everything, and it’s just so unfortunate that Meghan Cox Gurdon’s article had none.”

On the Wall Street Journal’s arts blog (on of the best arts blogs out there, by the way), “Speakeasy,” Christopher John Farley offers a nice, reasoned response from a parent’s point of view.

Linda Holmes, writing in her NPR column, “Monkey See,” has some great points—the full article is well worth a read. Shielding kids from books with dark themes, she argues, is pointless, because the “kids who are reading scary YA fiction . . . are the kids who, if YA fiction weren’t dark and creepy sometimes, would just read dark and creepy books for adults.” Right? Hell, I was reading V. C. Andrews in high school, and plenty of others were reading Stephen King. Kids are still reading these types of books, YA or not. Holmes concludes, “Not reading scary, weird, dark, or dirty books wouldn’t have made me a different kid. It certainly wouldn’t have made me a happier kid. It might have made me a kid who read less, though.”

And finally, perhaps my favorite response—short and to-the-point and no-nonsense—is Horn Book’s Roger Sutton. He writes, simply, that “people like reading about people like themselves whose problems are more interesting than their own.” As for the whole somewhat grandiose “YA Saves” claims, Sutton says that’s all well and good, but writes, “Give me an author who is truthful and talented; spare me an author who writes to save lives.” I had this exact conversation with a friend last night, another YA writer. Sure, we hope our books make a difference and offer comfort. But as Sutton said, writers should just write honestly, without worrying about saving the world and all the kids in it. Finally, Sutton has this message to kids and parents: “If you’re a teen who is running your reading choices by your parents, grow up. If you’re a parent who feels compelled to approve your child’s reading, shut up. The books and the kids are all right.” Well said, Roger, well said.

By now you’ve probably read—or read about—this article in the Wall Street Journal about the “ever-more appalling offerings for adolescent readers.” It’s a nasty little piece—condescending, insulting, school-marmish, reactionary, and unfair.

Meghan Cox Gurdon has been the Journal’s children’s book critic for some time now. I’ve actually read and enjoyed many of her reviews, though I’ve always noticed a slightly conservative streak. For instance, I recently read a review where Mrs. Gurdon lamented the “foul language” in a book.  I think I’ve written in the past about how I hate when critics cry foul about bad language in books. I mean, get real. Anyway, her newest piece is not a review but an essay of sorts, splashed on the front page of the Journal’s usually quite fine Saturday book review section. The Internet exploded with rebuttals almost immediately, with the hashtag #YAsaves respresenting all of those who disagreed with Gurdon’s attack. You can ses some of those excellent responses here.

In attacking a rash of YA novels that are “lurid” and “dark,” Gurdon goes on to produce an embarrassing and out-of-touch screed. She laments that many YA books today are filled with “kidnappings and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings,” not to mention profanity. She seems to think these “lurid” subjects are included in books only to shock and get attention. Well, this might be true in some books. But she doesn’t get it. Because overall, these books—including the ones she singles out, books by authors like Sherman Alexie and Lauren Myracle—show teenagers the world in all of its dark reality. Sure, life can be great, full of lollipops and unicorns and happy days (okay, maybe not unicorns). But it can also be shitty and awful. Bad things do happen to kids in the world. Turn on the news, open a newspaper, you’ll see. Besides (and this is true of all fiction really, not just YA), no one really wants to read a book where all the characters are happy and have perfect lives. That’s not why most people read fiction. Fiction requires conflict, drama, challenge. Not that Gurdon is arguing for such shiny-happy-only books. But in trashing a good number of books that handle dark subjects, she seems to imply that reality has no place in books for kids.

I imagine she’d find plenty to object to in my own novel—the profanity (of course), the sexual situations, drinking, and drugs. The depiction of how some teenagers treat other teenagers with cruelty and insensitivity. I can only imagine that the presence of a gay teen who actually has sexual experiences would send her into a tizzy. I didn’t include any of these things to “shock” readers. In fact, at times, I was tempted to leave things out. Things that were, perhaps, too real. But, more than anything, I wanted to paint a realistic picture of the lives of two teenage boys. Even growing up in the conservative south, it was a reality that my peers drank, had sex, did drugs, cussed, and perhaps worse. Maybe many parents think their children live a Pollyanna existence, but that’s not the reality for most kids.

Gurdon argues, fairly, that parents should be able to monitor what their children read—and protect them from certain subjects. That is parenting, after all.  She then concludes by writing, “No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try and bulldoze coarseness and misery into their children’s lives.” Okay, true, no family is obliged. But overprotecting children from some of life’s dark realities—well, good luck with that. I would hope most parents would resist such policing. Sure, a ten-year-old girl probably shouldn’t read a novel about a girl who’s abducted and used as a sex slave by a crazed pederast. But there are plenty of challenging, tough reads out there that would be worth such a child’s time. Presenting reality and some unpleasant truths is hardly bulldozing “coarseness and misery” into children’s lives. Chances are, kids know about this stuff anyway.

Growing up, I had a mostly happy childhood, great parents, stability. Reading about worlds where kids didn’t have the same things only made me appreciate my own life more. Reading books about kids who did drugs or who beat people up didn’t make me want to go out and so the same thing. That’s not how it works for most people. If everyone went out and copied the behavior of people in books, well, the world would be even more chaotic and nuts than it already is.

To add insult to injury, Gurdon appends her story with a list of worthy recommended books for teens. Many of these are great—especially the books by Mark Haddon and Robert C. O’Brien, two of my own favorites—but these titles barely just scratch the surface, and some aren’t even YA books at all. Of all the books being written today for teens, these are the only ones she can recommend?

In the end, I guess it’s good that Gurdon wrote her piece, because it’s getting people talking once again about the value of YA fiction. I’m not a big fan of the idea that books are worthwhile only for the lessons they impart. Books should be entertaining, they should provide a window to a new world. Or, if not showing a glimpse of an entirely new world, great books can show your own world in a new light. Despite what Gurdon believes, many of the books she dismisses do these things quite well. And they won’t scar or tarnish teenagers. They’ll show them the world as it is, even if that world is way too dark for Gurdon’s liking.

A few articles of interest that I came across recently:

• In the Washington Post, Sarah Pekkanen takes up the “gender divide” issue in YA lit. Girls, of course, will read all kinds of books. Boys, of course, won’t. Sigh.
• Here’s a nice roundup of all the books nominated in the children’s and young adult category for the Lambda Literary Awards, including Love Drugged by James Klise and Jumpstart the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde.
• And the ALA came out with their annual Rainbow Project List in January. These titles “reflect significant gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans-gendered/queer-questioning (glbtq) experience for young people from birth to age 18.” It looks like a great list, so check it out.
• And finally, there’s a new online YA literary magazine out, called Verbal Pyrotechnics! The first issue is now posted. It includes a great short story by my friend Bernard Lumpkin! Give it a read.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Cris Beam’s debut novel, I Am J, which came out this month out from Little, Brown. I was thrilled to give the book a blurb, since I truly thought the book was something special. I am not alone in that thought. The book has received rave reviews. In a starred review in Booklist, a reviewer nicely sums up what makes I Am J so great: “Beam has written easily the best book to date about the complicated condition of being a transsexual teen, not only sharing important information that is artfully woven into the plot but also creating, in J, a multilayered, absolutely believable character whose pain readers will share. Perhaps most importantly, the author brings clarity and charity to a state of being that has too long been misunderstood, ignored, and deplored.”

Cris Beam was kind enough to respond to some questions I sent her. I hope you enjoy the following interview. And, please, go pick up a copy of I Am J very soon! You can find more information about Cris and her book here.

Your first book, Transparent, was a nonfiction book for adults about transgender teenagers. Is it safe to say that I AM J grew out of this book?

Yes, in a way. When I was first working on Transparent, I interviewed a lot of transboys, thinking that they would be a part of the book too. But as Transparent took shape, I realized I wanted to go deep rather than broad, and focus on a core group of friends over a prolonged period of time. My main subjects happened to be all girls. The boys, and their stories, stayed in my mind though, and I wanted to return to them. I also wanted to write a book for teenagers, rather than just about them.

This may overlap with the prior question, but did you have to do any research before you wrote I AM J?

I guess I’m always doing informal research into current transgender politics and literature and ideas because the two people in my immediate family—my partner and my foster daughter—are trans. That’s the wonderful part of my life and work. The ugly part is more experiential in that, through them, I see the ways transphobia operates at so many levels in our culture, and I often feel pretty impotent. All of the scenework in I Am J is fiction, but culled from actual experience with friends and family, so I wouldn’t call that research per se. I worked for two and a half years at a school in LA for GLBT teenagers, and taught a class for a few semesters at a similar school here in New York, so I’ve spent a lot of time with kids who are queer and struggling with their families of origin. And then, at multiple stages in the manuscript’s progression, I asked both trans- and cisgender guys to read it for accuracy and resonance, so I suppose that’s a form of research too.

A lot of people don’t understand people who are “transgender.” As a gay man, I liked to think I was sympathetic to the problems that transsexuals face, and that I understood more about transgender people than the average heterosexual person. But I admit I didn’t really always “get it,” as they say. Many things baffled me—it was just so foreign. But after I read I AM J, I felt like I had just been given an invaluable glimpse into a world that I had previously never truly understood. Was it your intention in writing I AM J to clear up many misconceptions? What are the biggest misconceptions people have about people who are transgender? Did you yourself learn something while writing the book?

Wow, that’s a lot of questions in one! I didn’t write the book to clear anything up, really. I wrote it because J was a character knocking around in my head looking for a way out. If the book is clarifying, I’m glad, but that’s also a risky idea for me—because J is just one person, and he doesn’t speak to or for a generalized transgender experience. As for misconceptions, different people have different ones—depending on who they are, how they were raised, where they live, whether they’re gay or straight or trans or cisgender and on and on. I guess one misconception—and one that I struggled with writing the book—is the idea that trans or gender variant people experience themselves as one gender: an opposite gender to the one assigned to them at birth. I thought a lot about this when I was writing J, because my partner, for instance, often feels like neither gender or like both. So I considered writing J as a boy who identified as a third gender. But he just wouldn’t stay that way on the page. That’s what I learned while writing the book—that my characters surprised me. I went into it thinking I had control (and I know a lot of authors say this) but the writing worked better when I let the scenes lead themselves.

Cris Beam

J is a painfully complex character, and though he might represent all transgender teenagers, he is also a fully formed individual. How did you tackle this particular challenge?

Yeah, that tricky representation idea again! For me, J doesn’t represent all transgender teenagers. At least I hope he doesn’t, or that readers don’t think of him that way. I think that in smaller genres, like trans lit, there’s a tremendous pressure to be representative, to be a lot of things to a lot of people. I was acutely aware of this because it’s a responsibility as well as a pressure; I had the privilege of being a writer with a major publishing house backing a teen transgender story, so I wanted to get some things right. And yet, I wanted to give J room to be a kid—an individual, imperfect, courageous, terrified, talented, regular kid. He’s just one voice among many—and, while there’s some wonderful transgender writing out there already, there’s so much more room on the shelves!

I AM J is an important novel, one that a lot of people can benefit from reading. But it’s not just a novel that deals with an important topic—it’s a wonderfully written, complex, moving story. Can you talk about your writing background? Did you always want to write novels?

Thanks for the compliment! I’ve always written, but my background is really in nonfiction. bell hooks said once that all writing is creative writing, and essentially I agree with her—it takes creativity and courage to face that crazy empty page from any direction. But I was surprised to discover how similar the writing processes really are: in both, you’re looking for great characters and plot and dialogue, and while you might know where you want to get by the end of a chapter or a book, you don’t always know how you’re going to get there. The people, the characters, are at the heart of it all.

Have you heard from any transgender teenagers since the book has appeared? Have you heard from any parents of transgender kids?

Yes, I’ve heard from both. The wonderful (and often terrifying) truth about the internet is that you get feedback in real time. And the feedback has been really positive. I love hearing from teenagers especially.

What are you working on now? Are there any more YA novels in your future?

I’ve been working on a nonfiction book about the state of foster care in New York City, and how it connects to child welfare overall. I’m really excited about this book, because I’ve followed several families over several years to track the cracks in the system through really personal and powerful stories. But yes, I’d like to return to YA. If I have a pattern, I’ll probably write a YA book about foster kids sometime soon!

A few weeks ago, Laura Miller penned an interesting piece in Salon about the gap between the number of women being published and reviewed in the literary world (in literary magazines, in books reviews, etc.) versus the number of men. She was reporting on findings by Vida (an organization for “women in literary arts”), which discovered that in most literary publications (e.g., The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House), men far outweigh women in representation. Miller’s piece goes into all sorts of questions related to this issue, but one of the most interesting tangents of the whole story is the assertion (or assumption?) that men read more literary works by men, whereas women read works by both men and women. Although the evidence for this may be, as Miller notes, anecdotal, in general I tend to think this is true.

But it is not true of every male writer, of course—including yours truly. Indeed, reading the piece, I wanted to stand up and shout: “Not me, not me!” Still, overall, if we’re going to generalize (and why not?), then I think it is the case for many male writers—they largely just read books by other men.

And why is this? In asking, I don’t claim to have any answers.

This gender gap, sadly, is also true of the YA world. I know young women read a lot of novels by women—but they also read works by men. I know this because I’ve gotten plenty of emails and comments from the wonderful world of female YA bloggers who’ve read my novel. But do boys read works by women, books about girls? Not usually. And as Miller notes, this bias, which starts young, might extend into adulthood.

Some anecdotal evidence of my own: During my grad school years (over ten years ago), the small graduate workshop was made up of about seven men and five women. If you asked any of the men who their favorites writers were, they’d reel off a list of men, barely mentioning a female writer. Barry Hannah, Tim O’Brien, Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, Hemingway, Faulkner—those were the writers most mentioned, as I recall. (Writers that I, too, love, but not to the exclusion of other writers.) Meanwhile, the females—true to the above-mentioned thesis—would mention some of those male writers, but also writers like Willa Cather, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and Joy Williams. (Flannery O’Connor was the one female writer that I recall getting bisexual support. But this was the south, and one of our teachers was obsessed with O’Connor, so that made sense.)

Anne Tyler

Why was this? Why is this? Why do so many men shy away from female writers?

This topic got me thinking about my favorite writers. I professed to love female writers as much as male writers, if not more—but was this ultimately the case? I’d never made an official list of favorite writers, though I do keep a list of my favorite books.

So, this got me thinking: Who are my favorite writers? I made a list. I might as well break them down by gender. First, the females, in mostly random order: Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Hilary Mantel, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Mary Robison, Deborah Eisenberg, Elizabeth Strout, Jennifer Egan, Julie Hecht, Willa Cather, and Jane Austen. For the men, it’s William Faulkner, William Maxwell, David Gates, Allan Gurganus, Keith Banner, E.M. Forster, William Trevor, Robert Cormier, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, J. D. Salinger, and Tobias Wolff.

Twelve women. Twelve men. Evenly divided. But ask me for my top two, and it becomes all about the women: Alice Munro and Anne Tyler are, without a doubt, my Top Two.

Why, then, do my tastes run to the more “feminine”? It is because I’m gay? I do know a number of gay male writers who share my affections for many of the female writers mentioned above, especially Tyler and Munro. And I think it’s true, as a whole, that more gay men list female writers in their list of favorites. But, again, this is anecdotal evidence on my part.

Explaining why I love Munro and Tyler so much—why I connect with their work, their writing styles—begs for a longer essay. Some people might describe them as writers who are more concerned with “domestic” and emotional matters—family, relationships, heartbreak, love. (This is not to say that men don’t write about these things, of course.) And perhaps that’s what I’m most attracted to, both as a writer and a reader.

So, back to my original query: Why don’t men read female writers? Is it just how we’re wired? Do we prefer to read about experiences that more reflect our own lives? There are not simple answers to these questions, of course. But I will always remember a male classmate who, when I told him I loved Alice Munro and that he should check her work out, replied scornfully that he found her work “boring.” “It’s just all that female stuff,” he said. I tried to argue him out of that narrow view—sure, it’s often about “female stuff,” but it’s really about so much more. To me, it’s the opposite of boring—it’s thrilling and invigorating, sentence after sentence of pleasure. But in the end I gave up and just thought to myself: “It’s your loss, buddy.” And indeed, I know this is true: My reading life—and thus my writing life—would be severely impoverished if I just read writers who share my gender.

Another year draws to a close. I had planned to write about how 2010 sucked. But then the more I thought about, the more I realized that this wasn’t entirely true. Sure, 2010—like every year, surely—had its sucky moments (which I won’t go into). But overall, a lot of great things happened this year: the paperback of my novel was published, I appeared in OUT Magazine, and I won the Alabama Author Award. But the biggest thing I accomplished was turning in the draft of my second novel. It was also a year of some good reads, a few good movies, and a decent bit of good TV. Before we head into 2011, a few reflections on some of the highlights of the 2010.

Many of the books I read are for work or else for my YA book club. Thus, I don’t usually have much time to devote to the hot new reads of 2010, like Freedom by Jonathan Franzen or any of the other much-hyped books of the year (with one exception, as I’ll discuss below). Still, I have read, so far, just over fifty books this year. To avoid any professional awkwardness, I won’t single out any books I worked on this year as part of my day job, though there were plenty that constitute highlights. Moving on with that caveat…

Hands down, my two favorites novels of the year were A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. These books blew me away. I’m lucky to read one such book a year. So I’m quite happy that encountered two such staggering achievements in one year. I wrote about Goon Squad earlier this year. Still, even when I talk about it or read stray passages in reviews, I’m reminded of its emotional hold over me. In its finest moments, it’s downright miraculous. It’s a book that I will reread each year for many years to come. I’m still haunted by Sasha, Rob, Rhea, Jocelyn, Rolf, and many of the other characters.

Wolf Hall was published in 2009, so it was a book everyone raved about last year. I finally got around to it this year. I discovered Mantel a few years ago and loved the two books I read: a dark and humorous pair of novels, Every Day Is Mother’s Day and Vacant Possessions. Her style is hard to describe—odd, flinty, darkly humorous, peppered with startling but lovely descriptions—but on the basis of those two novels alone, Mantel had already joined the shortlist of writers whose entire bodies of work I will hunt down and consume (Egan, of course, is also on this list). But Wolf Hall—Wolf Hall! What a novel! The novels tells the story of the turmoil surrounding Henry VIII when he wanted to dump his first wife to marry Anne Boleyn, told from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell, who became one of his most trusted and powerful advisers to the king. It’s a familiar historical story, but Mantel, as one reviewer wrote, manages to invest the story with thrilling amount of suspense. Most historians have viewed Cromwell in a negative light, while casting Sir Thomas More as the sympathetic martyr. Mantel reverses this viewpoint, brilliantly. By the end, I had grown to love Cromwell, whereas More came across as a bitter, snide, pompous, bigoted religious hardliner. Mantel made history come alive more than any writer I can remember. I am dying for the promised sequel, which will follow Cromwell to his death. The sequel can’t come soon enough. Meanwhile, Mantel’s backlist awaits, including another historical novel, this one about the French Revolution. Forget Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (sorry, Oprah)—I’m going to read Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.

The year brought other reading delights, of course. On the YA front, I loved Franciso X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World, Adam Rapp’s Punkzilla, and my dear friend Helen Ellis’s The Turning: What Curiosity Kills. I was thrilled to finally read two classics that truly deserve that lofty designation: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Judy Blume’s Forever. I was also thrilled to be asked to read and give a blurb for a YA novel that won’t appear until 2011: I Am J by Cris Beam. It’s a tough, gritty, sad, and lovely story about a young man who just happened to be born in the body of a female. It’s a powerful tale about a character not often represented in literature: a female-to-male transgender teenager. It’s an important book that will make a real difference to young people, and I expect it to get a lot of rave reviews next year.

I also fell in love with the poetry of Kay Ryan. Indeed, thanks to Ryan, I got over my long-held resistance to poetry and have started reading collections on a regular basis. I finally read—and loved—William Golding’s dark masterpiece, The Lord of the Flies. I finally finished The Stories of John Cheever, which I’d started last year. It’s a fat tome filled with plenty of the best short stories ever written. I was also blown away by Daniel Woodrell’s haunting novel of the Ozarks, Winter’s Bone (I also enjoyed the movie version, but it still pales next to the book). I also loved The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. It’s not a perfect novel, but it’s borne aloft by its boisterous storytelling and language, a true contribution to our national literature. I also read plenty of Alice Munro, who still may be my favorite writer of all time. I never tire of reading her brilliant short stories. And just a few days ago, I finished a beautifully quirky novel called Sisters by a River by a little-known British writer, Barbara Comyns. It’s out of print, as are most of her novels, but I had read and loved an earlier one, The Vet’s Daughter, a few years ago, when it was reissued by the awesome New York Review of Books Classics, and so I tracked down much of her backlist online, ordering used copies from various outlets. The good news is that another small publisher, called Dorothy, has just republished another Comyns novel, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Here’s hoping a Comyns renaissance is in the offing!

I must mention two short stories I read this year, both by Irish writers—and both of which appeared in The New Yorker. Say what you will about the uneven quality of the fiction in The New Yorker—sometimes they publish pieces that are truly spectacular. Claire Keegan’s story “Foster” broke my heart. Beautifully written, it packs an emotional punch that is rare in short fiction—in any fiction, really. If you only read one short story this year, read this one. It’s a beauty. Kevin Barry is another great discovery. His story, “Fjord of Killary,” was a delight. I had been aware of Keegan’s fine work, but Barry is one to look out for.

Sadly, I didn’t see too many movies this year. Right about now, there are about ten movies I want to see—including The Social Network, Black Swan, Blue Valentine, The King’s Speech—and haven’t made time for yet. Hopefully I can take those in over the next few weeks. So my “best of” list would be highly inadequate. (Did I even see ten movies in a theater this year?) But two standouts were The Kids Are All Right and Let Me In. Annette Benning, who plays one half of a couple of lesbian mothers in the hilarious but very moving The Kids Are All Right, was just amazing in a role that could have easily been unsympathetic. She’s the higher strung half of the couple, a wine-swilling doctor, fierce, driven, and protective mother who fights hard to keep her family together. She’s not always pleasant, but she’s a heartbreakingly real person.

Let Me In was an American remake of the Swedish movie Let the Right One In. I saw the original and found it creepy and haunting. I didn’t expect an American remake to be any good, but I have to say that I liked Let Me In even more than the Swedish original (blasphemy? Whatever, film snobs). It’s still creepy and haunting, but also emotionally stunning, graced by two sensitive, lovely performances by Chloë Grace Moretz as a vampire trapped in the body of a young girl, and Kodi Smith-McPhee as the lonely and bullied boy who befriends her. At times it was a bit too violent, a bit too gory, but overall it was a thrilling story that also packed an emotional wallop. And it’s gorgeously shot.

I suppose I didn’t see a ton of movies in the theater because mainly I watched movies on DVD at home. The whole experience of going to the movies can be a blast, but more often than not it’s all about dodging big crowds and big lines. And with big crowds, you get annoying and chatty and distracting people in the theaters, and sometimes lousy seats. Plus, in New York at least, movies are expensive. So why not just stay home? That said, I do love sitting in a dark theater (with overpriced but delicious popcorn!), watching a film, getting lost and transfixed in a cinematic world. I suppose I just get lazy and don’t want to deal with the hassle. I need to get over that in the next few weeks so I can go see the above-mentioned movies. I did just watch Toy Story 3 on DVD, and yep, everyone’s right—it’s wonderful. And it made this “grown man” cry.

Most of the buzz and excitement centers, nowadays, on TV, far more so than movies. Or at least it does in the circles I run in! One of my favorites TV shows, Lost, ended its run this year. If the final season and the finale itself were somewhat of a letdown, Lost will still go down as one of the best shows to ever air on television. It was one of those rare shows that I had to watch the same night it aired. I anticipated each episode much more than I’ve anticipated any movie opening. Mad Men is also one of the top-notch shows, and maybe the best one that I watched all year. The episode with Peggy and Don—in which Peggy’s engagement crumbles and Don’s long-time friend in California dies—was an edge-of-your-seat emotional rollercoaster. The series is a fascinating glimpse at our recent past; I can’t wait to see where it goes next. Though it’s not a perfect show, I loved every minute of The Walking Dead. It’s a brilliant concept—zombie movie expanded into a full-length series—that just might bet better and better. It sure is unlike anything else on TV—like a mini horror movie each week, but with a little more emotional heft.

So there it all is, the cultural highlights of 2010. I could go on and discuss what music I listened to, but my taste is terribly unhip. I made a few discoveries, but mainly I like the usual crap that everyone likes. So here’s to 2010, a not-bad year. And here’s to 2011, which will hopefully be even better! Happy holidays, and see you next year!